singularly unloveable type. Years of grown-up society and the
absence of anything approaching discipline had given him a
precocity on which the earnest efforts of a series of private
tutors had expended themselves in vain. They came, full of
optimism and self-confidence, to retire after a brief interval,
shattered by the boy's stodgy resistance to education in any form
or shape. To Mr. Pett, never at his ease with boys, Ogden Ford
was a constant irritant. He disliked his stepson's personality,
and he more than suspected him of stealing his cigarettes. It
was an additional annoyance that he was fully aware of the
impossibility of ever catching him at it.

Mr. Pett resumed his journey. He had interrupted it for a moment
to listen at the door of the morning-room, but, a remark in a
high tenor voice about the essential Christianity of the poet
Shelley filtering through the oak, he had moved on.

Silence from behind another door farther down the passage
encouraged him to place his fingers on the handle, but a crashing
chord from an unseen piano made him remove them swiftly. He
roamed on, and a few minutes later the process of elimination had
brought him to what was technically his own private library--a
large, soothing room full of old books, of which his father had
been a great collector. Mr. Pett did not read old books himself,
but he liked to be among them, and it is proof of his pessimism
that he had not tried the library first. To his depressed mind it
had seemed hardly possible that there could be nobody there.

He stood outside the door, listening tensely. He could hear
nothing. He went in, and for an instant experienced that ecstatic